Tornado Alley (PROG)

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oops.. Donald Trump: White House backtracks on refugee deal struck with Australia, says it is still under consideration

"Donald Trump and Malcolm Turnbull speak on phone, US deal to go ahead"

By Washington bureau chief Zoe Daniel, staff

Updated yesterday at 6:35pm

Video: White House Press Secretary confirms Australia refugee deal will go ahead but with "extreme vetting" (ABC News)

The White House has backtracked on a promise to honour a refugee deal with Australia,
saying President Donald Trump is still considering whether it will go ahead.

Key points:

* Refugee deal concerns 1,250 refugees, some from countries on Trump's travel ban list

* Deal struck between Obama administration and Turnbull Government

* President still deciding whether to honour the deal after executive order suspends US refugee program

The clarification came soon after White House press secretary Sean Spicer said the deal
was going ahead provided the refugees were subjected to "extreme vetting" procedures.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-02-01/white-house-backtracks-on-australia-refugee-deal/8228336

.. apparently on this last telephone call there was shouting (guess who) on the telephone ..

.. and a reminder that Obama's travel restrictions for some of 2011 and 2015 were NOT at all
like the Trump bans .. the Trump administration and some conservatives are lying about that ..

Trump says Obama banned refugees too. He’s wrong. .. bit ..

“There was no ban on Iraqis in 2011,” Rhodes tweeted. “Anyone pushing that line is hiding behind a lie because they can't defend the EO.”

Finer and Rhodes’s account is backed up by two fact-checkers who looked into the issue, the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler and FactCheck.org’s Eugene Kiely. Both concluded, in lengthy investigations that I encourage you to read, that Obama’s policy was not a six-month ban on Iraqi refugees.

Just to make this crystal clear, let’s place Obama’s policy and Trump’s policy side by side:

--
Obama: imposes new security checks on Iraqi refugees in response to a specific flaw in the security screening for people from that country, which slows down the admission rate of Iraqi refugees for six months but does not eliminate it.

Trump: Bans all refugees, from every country on Earth, for four months, with no evidence of a specific flaw in the refugee screening process, at a time when there are at least 60 percent more refugees worldwide than there were in 2011.
--

[...]

Obama did not say that people from the seven countries Trump targets are special terrorism risks

[...]

The Obama-era rule also had a great deal of exceptions.

“To avoid punishing people who clearly had good reasons to travel to the relevant countries, the Obama administration used a waiver provided by Congress for certain travelers, including journalists, aid workers, and officials from international organizations like the United Nations,” Finer explains.

This makes an absolutely massive difference in the kinds of people who would be covered by the two different policies. Here are three hypothetical examples that illustrate the point:

--
* A member of the Iranian opposition — let’s call him Mehdi — flees Iran to avoid being arrested after organizing a demonstration in Tehran. Trump’s policy bans Mehdi from entering the United States, whereas Obama’s would not affect Mehdi at all.

* A teenager born and raised in Germany — let’s call her Leila — has Iranian citizenship from her mother. If she wants to travel to the US on a school trip, Obama’s policy would mean that Leila could still enter the United States, but would need to acquire a visa before doing so. Trump’s policy would bar her from entry entirely.

* A Lebanese Shia Muslim with a French mother — let’s call him Ahmed — travels to Tehran, potentially because he is a member of Hezbollah who was training with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. Obama’s policy would subject him to heightened screening, because he recently traveled to Iran. Trump’s policy would not affect him at all, because he is a French-Lebanese national.
--

By focusing on dual nationals and travelers from mostly European countries, rather than nationality, Obama’s policy is targeted to a specific threat — the real phenomenon of Westerners who get radicalized and attracted to militant Islamism. This made sense, kind of obliquely, as an immediate response to San Bernardino — one of the shooters, Syed Farook, was an American citizen who had traveled to Saudi Arabia.

By that logic, focusing on those seven countries makes a certain kind of sense. Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Somalia are all anarchic states with large jihadist presences; Westerners do travel there to join militant groups. Iran and Sudan are led by anti-American regimes that have histories of collaborating with militant groups.

What it doesn’t justify, as the examples of Mehdi and Leila prove, is barring everyone from those countries from entering the United States. Trump’s policy treats Mehdi and Leila as equivalent security risks to Ahmed, and decides to screw them all over as a result.
http://www.vox.com/world/2017/1/31/14444862/obama-refugee-ban-2011

first posted, 2nd article here .. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=128354177